Medford mail tribune., November 29, 1959, Image 36

Family Weekly is proud to present the first of a
two-part condensation of the soul-searching story
of a famous broadcaster's battle for health and hap
piness against a relentless foe drug addiction. This
is the story of his secret war and his final victory.
We salute his courage in telling his story as an in
spiration to others. Both installments are excerpted
from his autobiography, "The Taste of Ashes," writ
ten with Oscar Fraley. Copyright 1959 by Oscar
Fraley and Bill Stern. By permission of Henry Holt
& Co., Inc., 383 Madison Ave., New York 17. N. Y.
IT was a day of sunshine and laughter. The huge
oval Sugar Bowl Stadium in New Orleans was
packed with 83,000 football fans this New Year's
Day of 1956 to watch Georgia Tech play Pittsburgh.
The opening kickoff was only minutes away.
These are always moments of tension. Yet there
was even more of an undercurrent than usual in the
American Broadcasting Company radio-television
booth perched high atop the concrete lip of the
sprawling stadium.
Bill Stern, whose mellow, authoritative voice was
to carry the game to countless millions from coast
to coast, was late.
A moment later he burst into the booth, plunged
to his seat, and took the signal from the' engineer.
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is
Bill Stern speaking from the Sugar Bowl in New
Orleans, where this afternoon we bring you the
Sugar Bowl classic between Pittsburgh and Georgia
Tech. The captains are going out on the field, and
here are the starting lineups:
"For Pittsburgh, at left end, Joe Walton, 210
pounds, from Beaver Falls, Pa.
"At left tackle, Bob Pollock, six feet, two inches,
from Mount Carmel, Pa."
After these few words, the tension in the booth
built to a suffocating pitch.
Bill Stern, the man whose smooth, steady patter
was radio legend, had begun to run down like an
old-fashioned phonograph. Wide-eyed watchers in
the booth noticed for the first time that his make-up
had been daubed on with slapdash abandon, show
ing waxy white patches of skin, and his lips moved
with a strange mechanical stiffness.
"At left tackle," he repeated, groping for words
that would not come, "at left tackle, ah, Bob, ah . . ."
The floor man stared helplessly at Ray Scott, who
was to assist Stern in the broadcast Billy White
house, ABC's sports editor, acted. Snatching a pen
cil, he scribbled a note and thrust it in front of Stern.
"Give it to Scott"
Bill Stern sat there, his voice frozen inside him,
as the game began. A few minutes later, with pain
fully studied deliberation, he lifted himself from
his chair and stumbled blindly from the booth.
What had happened to Bill Stern?
He wasn't a drinker. ABC, searching desperately
for a plausible excuse, announced that he had been
shaken up in an automobile accident enroute to the
stadium.
That was a fantasy, just as were some of the
stories Bill Stern had told on the air as he drove
himself ruthlessly to success and a $200,000-a-year
income.
The truth was a dark secret Bill Stern had fought
to keep from the world for 16 years: that he was a
"legal" drug addict
It all began on another bright, sunshiny day in
Texas 21 years before with an automobile accident
and led through physical agony and mental torment
to a sanitarium where, for six months during 1956,
Bill Stern fought and won a desperate battle for
his life.
This is the story of that battle and the courage it
took to find victory in the darkest hour.
FmnUy WMkly. November 2fl. IMS
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